Writer and scholar Reza Aslan was 15 years old when he found Jesus. His secular Muslim family had fled to the U.S. from Iran, and Aslan’s conversion was, in a sense, an adolescent’s attempt to fit into American life and culture. “My parents were certainly surprised,” Aslan tells Fresh Air’s Terry Gross.
As Aslan got older, he began his studies in the history of Christianity, and he started to lose faith. He came to the realization that Jesus of Nazareth was quite different from the Messiah he’d been introduced to at church. “I became very angry,” he says. “I became resentful. I turned away from Christianity. I began to really reject the concept of Christ.”
But Aslan continued his Christian scholarship, and he found that he was increasingly interested in Jesus as a historical figure. The result is his new book, Zealot: The Life and Times of Jesus of Nazareth ”” a historical look at Jesus in the context of his time and Jewish religion, and against the backdrop of the Roman Empire.
All books about the life of Jesus say much more about the author than they do about Jesus. A good example is Schweitzer compared with Ourselr.
Haven’t read the book, so take what follows with a pinch of salt. Every single point he makes on the page linked above is (a) old hat, and (b) largely questioned our demolished outright by thoughtful scholars. I’d be surprised if Reza has interacted with all the evidence.
[blockquote]…there’s nothing unique about what Jesus did… What I’m fascinated by is that out of that dozen or so so-called Messiahs in first-century Palestine, only one of them is still called ‘Messiah.’ “[/blockquote]Wright would have a field day with this remark alone. Actually, don’t bother poor Tom, he’s written the book already. So is or isn’t Jesus unique? What does this weight of historical evidence tell you?
[blockquote]”There’s only one reason to be crucified under the Roman Empire and that is for treason or sedition.[/blockquote]Four letters. INRI.
[blockquote]If you’re asking if whether Jesus expected to be seen as God made flesh… then the answer to that is absolutely no. Such a thing did not exist in Judaism.[/blockquote]So, your premise is that Jesus can never have transcended the Jewish matrix. And your conclusion is that he never saw himself as anything other than an ordinary Jew. Gee, I didn’t see that coming. Glad that’s cleared up then. Say, have a beer with the Jesus Seminar over there.
[blockquote]”Almost every word ever written about Jesus was written by people who didn’t actually know Jesus when he was alive.[/blockquote]Arguable. What is clear that they had access to first-hand witnesses for their accounts. Read Bauckham’s [i]Jesus and the Eyewitnesses[/i].
[blockquote]The Apostles… couldn’t really espouse Christology, high-minded theology about who Jesus was… creating what we now know as Christianity, fell to a group of urbanized, Hellenized, educated Jews in the Diaspora[/blockquote]Naive assertion. In actual fact, it has become increasingly clear that even the earliest material in scripture shows an astonishingly high Christology. It is also significant that while Paul has clear points of tension with the church in Jerusalem (not really your typical diaspora Hellenists), none of it is Christological; this suggests strongly that Paul’s high view of Jesus was entirely uncontroversial among both Jewish and Gentile Christians. Read Hurtado’s [i]Lord Jesus Christ[/i].
Really, why is any of this seen as news? There’s nothing here that hasn’t been discussed (and debunked) at length for 50 years or more.
When I was a little sophomore at the University of Iowa in the fall of 2001, I had Aslan as a teacher for Intro to Islam (he taught several courses while at Iowa studying for his MFA). He made it a point of never divulging his religion. I never would have guessed at the time he was a lapsed Christian. Interesting.
2, why is it news? NPR has been pushing this in part because he is an apostate evangelical who returned to Islam. This serves the liberal agenda of trashing Christianity and promoting multiculturalism and Islam. I mean what better way to spend your day than by trumpeting that Christianity is the biggest fraud ever perpetrated on all of mankind.